Virtual CIFS performance...

[mdrenwick]

I'm trying to assess the suitability of Alfresco for my company.

I'm trying to glean some performance metrics.

The headline figure that Alfresco runs 5x faster than competing ECMs (ref. Alfresco website presentations) is meaningless for me as I currently use the manual shared-drive method for content management. (I know, I know…)

Does anyone have any relative performance figures for a _standard_ CIFS shared drive versus an Alfresco Virtual CIFS shared drive.

Are there any obvious performance issues for the virtual CIFS drive, that wouldn't be experienced on a standard CIFS drive?

[kevinr]

It is hard to quantify It depends very much on the type of files you are dealing with. When reading and dir listing using CIFS it is very fast. When writing it will be slower as we index documents. If the documents do not requiring indexing (i.e. images) then it will be fast, if it's complex documents such as Word, Excel, PDF then it will be slower as those docs are indexed. So i suggest any tests you make should use a representive selection of document types - otherwise the figures will be meaningless.

Thanks,

Kevin

[rdanner]

It is hard to quantify It depends very much on the type of files you are dealing with. When reading and dir listing using CIFS it is very fast. When writing it will be slower as we index documents. If the documents do not requiring indexing (i.e. images) then it will be fast, if it's complex documents such as Word, Excel, PDF then it will be slower as those docs are indexed. So i suggest any tests you make should use a representive selection of document types - otherwise the figures will be meaningless.

Thanks,

Kevin

Hard to quantify but not so hard to qualify  

The other thing you need to consider is the cost of any action associated with the space that cannot run in the background.

[heislord5]

why isn't indexing done asyncronously?

I noticed a significant performance hit when I tried alfresco maybe 6 months ago using CIFS.  I would assume performance has been worked on since I was playing with it and I also don't know how much that had to do with my desktop setup.

[kevinr]

You can config indexing for content to be performed asyncronously if you wish. Yes performance has been improved.

Thanks,

Kevin

[xerox]

You can config indexing for content to be performed asyncronously if you wish

Where can I configure that?
What are de advantages and disadvantages?

friendly regards,
Nick

[andy]

Hi

Content indexing is pushed into the background in any case if the conversion to text is estimated to take too long. The remaining metadata will be indexed synchronously unless set other wise in the DD.

Andy

[kevinr]

As Andy says, you can modify the contentModel.xml and by setting <atomic>false</atomic> in the <index> bloc for a type will make it index in the background.

Kevin